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How to sway the odds of conceiving a girl

I just received this question in my personal "in box" and I want to post my reply here so that everyone may benefit.

My main question for you is about how you conceived a girl. I already have a son he is 1 very soon and i would like to try for a girl what did you do that increased your chances of having a girl?

It is obvious that this forum member has spent some time reading my forum posts because she knows that when we tried to have our first child, my husband really wanted a girl, so I learned how to sway our odds of conceiving a girl. He gave me only one month to try for a baby (he wasn't too sure about taking on the responsibility of caring for a child) and I figured that if I could give him the little girl he wanted, it might spark his interest in having more children (we ended up having 5).

So we did some specific things during that one month that we tried, and I gave birth to a daughter 9 months later.

There are many different techniques that can be used to help sway the chances of conceiving a girl. Some people swear that if you wait to try for a girl until the moon is just right, that it will help. Personally I haven't studied that theory much and I'd have a really hard time waiting for the moon to be right. I'd rather try every single month

So the things we did involved the right position during sex and the right timing during the month. There are other things you can do, and I'd encourage you to get the book How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby by the Shettles.

The little girl sperm are stronger and more resilient than the boy sperm which means a couple of things.

1. If you deposit the sperm shallowly (closer to the opening of your vagina) all sperm will have to swim around in the vaginal area, which tends to be more acidic than the area just beyond the cervix. This means that the little boy sperm will not survive as well (some will, of course, but many will not). The little girl sperm will still be able to swim through the cervix because they are stronger and affected less by the acidic environment of the vagina.

Feel free to make love in any position that you'd like, but before you finish, lay on your back and have your husband finish shallowly in you - you don't want to be so shallow that some comes out, but shallow enough that the sperm is not deposited close to the cervix (shallow penetration is better than deep penetration at the end).

2. The cervical mucus at the beginning of your fertile window is thicker and can be slightly more acidic than the mucus that is produced at the time of ovulation. Once again, this gives you an opportunity to reduce the number of boy sperm if you make love during the time when the mucus is thicker and more acidic. The thicker the mucus, the stronger the sperm must be in order to swim in it. When trying for a girl you'll want to make love at least 3 days before ovulation. This helps to ensure that by the time you ovulate, most of the little boy sperm will have died, and the little girl sperm will be hanging around in the fallopian tubes, waiting for an egg to be released.

In our case I knew that I had a 5 day fertile window, and I knew how to detect when I was on the first day of my fertile window. I was able to tell this by watching my body's signs of fertility which I explain in more depth on the post entitled Detecting Ovulation Even With Irregular Cycles.

One of the best things to help you determine when you're going into your fertile window is a fertility monitor. You just test every day and it will tell you how fertile you are each day - plus it will tell you when you're at your highest fertility. For anyone just trying to conceive and not really caring what gender they conceive, making love on the days when you are most fertile will result in the greatest chance of pregnancy. But for someone wanting to conceive a girl, a fertility monitor can be very, very helpful in catching those first 2 or 3 days of your fertile window, when making love gives you the best possible chance of having a daughter.

Some studies have also found that a husband and wife who want to have a girl should avoid coffee. We never drank coffee so this wasn't something we had to avoid, but coffee isn't good for a woman who is pregnant or trying to get pregnant anyway, so I would avoid it.

Hope this gives you some information to start with. Timing and technique are the two most important things when trying to sway the odds of having a girl.

When trying for a girl, you want to be slightly on the acidic side. Not too acidic, but not alkaline. Our diets typically tend to be on the acidic side, so I'd say that the diet changes become more important when you're really trying to alkalize your body more (which means drinking green juices, eating lots of dark leafy green vegetables, avoiding sugar and refined flour products, avoiding fast food, reducing intake of meat and dairy, etc.).

I would encourage you to make sure you're eating a very healthy diet and that you're caring for yourself well during this preconception phase.